The Real Reason Why Spain Is So Dominant At Soccer

When you think of Spain’s brilliance at soccer, you don’t immediately think of Bilbao. But even Spanish provincial towns have a lot to celebrate nowadays. Wandering around the rainy northern port city last month, I was struck by all the red and white Athletic Bilbao flags hanging from windows. The local club had just knocked Manchester United out of the Europa League with surprising ease. That was quite a feat. Whereas United has “fan stores” around the planet, Athletic seems to be run entirely out of the quiet, glorious former ship-owner’s mansion a five-minute walk along the river from Bilbao’s Guggenheim museum. And Athletic doesn’t recruit like United. Not only does the club shun foreign players, but it hardly even recruits from the rest of Spain. Athletic only fields men born and raised in Spain’s Basque country or expatriate Basques.

There’s no logical reason why Athletic should be one of five Spanish clubs to have made the semifinals of the Europa League and Champions League, especially during a terrible Spanish recession. Nor is there any logic to this country of just 46 million people being both reigning world and European champions. And should you think it’s just the fluke of a few geniuses being born in the same generation, Spain’s under-21 and under-19 national teams are reigning European champions, too. Spain is also about to knock much richer England off the top of the ranking for club teams compiled by UEFA, the European soccer association. Something remarkable is going on here. Spain doesn’t just have the world’s best players; it also has the best system.

What has happened is that the passing style introduced by the Dutchman Johan Cruijff at Barcelona in the 1970s and 1980s has gradually become a national style. This began in the 1990s, when other Spanish clubs started looking to Cruijff’s “Dream Team” for ideas. If Spain had a national style of play before then, it was the “furia roja” (the “red fury”), a game that was all passion and willpower. Gradually, instead of treating soccer as a battle, the Spaniards came to treat it as a sort of chess. Their style became known as “tiki-taka,” a game of short passes. Today, even Real Madrid’s academy churns out tiki-taka players, and in youth soccer, they are a match for Barcelona — though getting into Real’s first team is a different matter.

By the 2006 World Cup, Spain’s coach Luis Aragones — for much of his career a merchant of counterattack — made short passing the style of the national team. It was during that tournament that the late Spanish TV commentator Andrés Montes popularized the phrase “tiki-taka.” No longer did Spain charge around senselessly; now it controlled games. The Anglo-Spanish writer Jimmy Burns, in his excellent new book La Roja, reaches for a bullfighting metaphor: Spain’s change of style was “a change of identity from bull to torero.”

The embodiment of tiki-taka is, of course, the little man. Albert Capellas, then youth coordinator of the Masia, told me in 2009: “If he’s small or if he’s tall, for us that is not important.”

Just how revolutionary that simple statement is becomes clear when you compare Spain to a country that still thinks size matters: England. Leon Britton was for years a moustachioed journeyman midfielder with Swansea in the English lower divisions. He passed nicely, but at 1.68 meters, and slight with it, he was considered too small for the top. This season, aged 29, in Swansea’s first year in the Premier League, Britton has finally been discovered. In one game he completed all 67 passes he attempted, and midway through the season he had the highest pass completion rate in Europe, just ahead of Xavi. Had Britton been Spanish, he would never have spent those years in the wastelands.

Tiki-taka percolated from Barcelona first to Spain’s national team and gradually to most Spanish clubs. Even in Spain’s second division you can now see defenders weaving intricate passes from their own penalty areas while their coaches try not to have heart attacks on the bench. Last summer Athletic Bilbao went the whole hog and imported one of the fathers of tiki-taka, the Argentine Marcelo Bielsa.